Books in the Literature and Philosophy series

Reconsiders the fate of the doctrine of mimesis in the eighteenth century. This book argues that mimesis, rather than disappearing, instead became a far more pervasive idea in the eighteenth century by becoming submerged within the dynamics of the emerging accounts of judgement and taste.

Interweaving past and present texts, The Challenge of Coleridge engages the British Romantic poet, critic, and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge in a "conversation" (in Hans-Georg Gadamer''s sense) with philosophical thinkers today who share his interest in the relationship of interpretation to ethics and whose ideas can be both illuminated and challenged by Coleridge''s insights into and struggles with this relationship.In his philosophy, poetry, theology, and personal life, Coleridge revealed his concern with this issue, as it manifests itself in the relation between technical and ethical discourse, between fact and value, between self and other, and in the ethical function of aesthetic experience and the role of love in interpretation and ethical action.Relying on Gadamer''s hermeneutics to supply a framework for his approach, Haney connects Coleridge''s ideas with, among others, Emmanuel Levinas''s other-oriented notion of ethical subjectivity, Paul Ricoeur''s view about the other''s implication in the self, reinterpretations of Greek drama by Bernard Williams and Martha Nussbaum, and Gianni Vattimo''s post-Nietzschean hermeneutics.Coleridge is treated not as a product of Romantic ideology to be deconstructed from a modern perspective, but as a writer who offers a "challenge" to our modern tendency to compartmentalize interpretive issues as a concern for literary theorists and ethical issues as a concern for philosophers. Looking at the two together, Haney shows through his reading of Coleridge, can enrich our understanding of both.

This text presents a revisionist interpretation of Emerson's philosophical discourse placing him at the juncture of modernism and postmodernism in the Western philosophical tradition.

A wide-ranging exegesis that systematically traces the history of philosophical conceptions of the passions in the work of such thinkers as Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Spinoza, Descartes, Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant and Freud. It asks whether passion tortures people because it blinds them.

An exploration of the philosophical and rhetorical implications of William Wordsworth's desire for language to be an "incarnation" of thought. This book concentrates on familiar Wordsworthian texts such as "The Prelude" and also on less frequently read texts such as "The Excursion".

Draws on philosophical and novelistic texts from the Western European and Russian canons to explore a crucial moment in the epistemological history of narrative and present a nonreductive way of conjugating the histories of philosophy and the novel.

Covering sensationism, a philosophy of the French Enlightenment and 18th-century French literature, this study presents the main ideas of sensationism philosophers such as Condillac, Bonnet and Helvetius. An examination of the mind-body problem is also included in the discussion.

Examines Nietzsche's approach to what he called "the tragic age of the Greeks" as the foundation not only for his attack upon the birth of philosophy during the "Socratic era," but also for his overall critique of Western culture.

Investigates what Nietzsche called the "problem of Socrates," as that problem manifests itself in Plato's work. In particular, the book demonstrates how Socrates' own confrontation with this problem is the key to understanding the distinctively mimetic, dialogic, and reflexive character of Socratic philosophy.

Examines the crisis of a late eighteenth-century anthropology as it relates to the emergence of a modern consciousness that sees itself as condemned to draw its norms and very self-understanding from itself.

Focuses on the phenomenon of self-deception, and proposes a radical revision of our commonplace understanding of it as a token of irrationality. Argues that self-deception can illuminate the rationalistic functions of character.

Examines the relationship between philosophy and literature through an engagement with Plato's dialogues.